A Strange Country E-Book

Muriel Barbery

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 431

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

From the acclaimed author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, A Strange Country, the sequel to The Life of Elves and described as a 'strange and poetic fantasy similar to the work of Tolkien' by the San Francisco Book Review, will transport readers to a lost world and remind them of the power of poetry and imagination. Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora, young officers in the Spanish regular army, are stationed alone at Castillo when a friendly redhead named Petrus appears out of nowhere. There is something magnetic and deeply mysterious about him. Alejandro and Jesús are bewitched, and, in the middle of the sixth year of the longest war humankind has ever endured, they abandon their post to follow him across a bridge that only he can see. Petrus brings them to a world of lingering fog, strange beings, poetry, music, natural wonders, harmony and extraordinary beauty. This is where the fate of the world and all its living creatures is decided. Yet this world too is under threat. A long battle against the forces of disenchantment is drawing to a climactic close. Will poetry and beauty prevail over darkness and death? And what role will Alejandro and Jesús play?

Leseprobe

Muriel Barbery is the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and The Gourmet. She has lived in Kyoto and Amsterdam and now lives in the French countryside.

Alison Anderson is a translator and author. She has translated numerous novels from French, including The Elegance of the Hedgehog and The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery.

Praise for The Life of Elves:

‘An enigmatic and beguiling fairy tale … Barbery explores the mystical connections between nature, art and the human heart with vividness and clarity’ New York Times

‘This is a truly enchanting story, beautifully told and rich in meaning … this book truly deserves to be read by story lovers of all ages.’ Irish Times

‘This fervent, idiosyncratic fable is undeniable evidence of a richly lyrical imagination.’ Kirkus Reviews

‘Vivid imagery and a thread of mystery draw readers into the timeless and ethereal world’ Booklist

‘An emotional, entertaining examination of magic in the modern world’ France Today

Praise for The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

‘Many authors dream of getting their books onto best-seller lists, but few pull it off with the panache of French writer Muriel Barbery’ Time

‘A profound but accessible book … which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction … The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, by the end, quite radical in its stand against French classism and hypocrisy … Clever, informative and moving’ The Observer

‘Its appeal is obvious … a feel-good book with philosophical aspirations’ The Guardian

‘At once absurd and lyrical, cheery and bleak, contemplative and tender … It is the revelatory joy the characters afford each other—with recognition, with friendship, with love—that quietly rises to the top.’ New Statesman

‘Muriel Barbery … commands the sophistication, polish and mental agility that often distinguish French fiction … Barbery has a warm heart and a heart moreover that knows that great art and the best philosophy may (just possibly) possess redemptive qualities, or at least make life bearable in a materialistic and self-indulgent world.’ Sydney Morning Herald

A STRANGE COUNTRY

Muriel Barbery

A STRANGE COUNTRY

Muriel Barbery

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Un étrange pays

by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

Copyright © 2019 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris

English translation copyright © Europa Editions 2020

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street, London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from

the British Library

ISBN 9781805333791

Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

For SébastienFor Gérard, my father

CONTENTS

BOOKS

ALLIANCES1938

GENESIS1800–1938

RUIN1938

CHRONOLOGY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

in the final hour of lovingeverything shall be emptyand full of wonder

BOOKS

戦争

WAR

There was a time when a great war, the grandest strategic game ever played, consumed the two brethren worlds.

I would like to tell you the story in the proper way: it cannot be written in one single book. Indeed, mankind and the elves would be more at peace with themselves if they knew the four Books.

The four Books came from the four Sources, but they are customarily grouped under two motifs: murder, on the one hand; and poetry, on the other.

Book I – Those who have never prayed at night shall be denied the understanding of the price of desire.

Book II – Those who mistake force for courage shall be denied the privilege of striding through the realm of fear in peace.

Book III – Those whose eyes have never been burned by beauty shall be denied the right to die in the sun.

Book IV – But those who set conditions on love shall be granted the right to know the boundlessness of misfortune.

Who has time to think about the great Books when war is raging and the living are dying? And yet, their pages blend with the song of the earth and the sky, and can be heard in the very heart of battle.

同盟

ALLIANCE

In these tragic times, a company of elves and humans could hear the winds of dreams and believe in the rebirth of the four Books.

Among them were two young women, a priest, a painter, and a most remarkable elf, whose name would have been lost in the sands of time – for he was of no illustrious lineage – had he not, during this long war, been the constant catalyst of meetings.

What follows is the story of the last alliance between humans and elves.

物語

TALE

However, before we begin, let it be known: we who live under the land of Spain are only responsible for the tale of the west. I know that in the east our people do not reside in the depths of the earth, but on the crest of a mountain; in the north on the shores of a frozen sea; and in the south on a plain inhabited by wild animals.

Who can hear us? We have neither heralds, nor tribunes, nor a face, and we listen to the dead telling us the story that we murmur into the ears of the living.

ALLIANCES1938

PREAMBLE

At the beginning of this tale, the human world has been at war for six years.

The war was started by a coalition, the Confederation, which was led by the Italy of Raffaele Santangelo and also included France and Germany. The rumours of war that had been circulating for several months were swept aside by a large-scale invasion, which overwhelmed the members of the League: Spain, Great Britain, and the countries of northern Europe.

Spain was an unusual case: the king was the League’s natural ally, but part of his army, which had long been preparing to betray him, broke away and allied themselves with the Confederation. At the beginning of the war, the regular Spanish troops loyal to the Crown and the League found themselves surrounded by renegade generals, and Spain was cut off from her allies.

A remarkable event occurred in 1932, during the first year of the conflict, when an independent civilian resistance was organized in the countries under Confederation rule.

Santangelo’s intentions were clear right from the start. In reaction to the League’s refusal to renegotiate the treaties from the previous war, he set out to redraw Europe’s borders by force. In the name of Italian pride and racial purity, he implemented a policy of mass displacement of the peninsula’s inhabitants. In 1932, he passed laws on ethnic exclusion that would soon be enshrined in the Italian constitution; by 1938, there were camps all over the Europe of the Confederation.

FOR YOUR DEAD

Alejandro de Yepes was born in the land he was now defending in the snow. Others were fighting to win the war, but General de Yepes waged war for the tombs and acres of his ancestors, and hardly cared whether the League eventually triumphed or not. He was the native son of a region so poor that its noblemen looked flea-ridden to the rest of Spain; and indeed his father, in his lifetime, had been both thoroughly noble and thoroughly poor. People perished of hunger even as they admired from the Castillo promontory the most sublime view in all Extremadura and Castile and León combined; the fortress being situated on the border between the provinces, in a single movement one could release one’s eagles towards Salamanca and Cáceres. Good fortune saw to it that Alejandro would return there after six years of fighting far from home, at a time when Extremadura was becoming pivotal to the major offensive which, it was hoped, would bring an end to the war. What is more, that same good fortune had enabled the young general to return home a hero, for he had displayed a strategic acumen beyond the ken of his superiors.

These superiors were men of great valour. They knew how to lead and how to fight and they found it easy to hate an enemy who was even more abject than those they had fought in the past. They considered themselves servants of the League as much as of a Spain divided by treachery, and they had waged both battles at the same time with the bravery that comes with the conviction of the heart. Surprisingly, most of the officers hailed from rural parts of the country, while the cities had sided primarily with the enemy. It was an army made of men accustomed to handling rifles since childhood, and the harshness of their land had made them rugged and wily in action. They chose to side with the League because they shared an allegiance with their ancestors and with the king, and had no qualms about fighting their turncoat brothers. The fact that they were outnumbered ten to one did not worry them; as such, temerity had been their first mistake: a sense of gallantry inherited from their fathers had compelled the officers to fight in the front line, until voices – including Alejandro’s – insisted they could not send soldiers into battle without leaders. And since those leaders had amply demonstrated their courage, they did without the displays of honour from then on. No one doubted, anyway, that true honour consists in paying respects to the earth and sky, and that to honour one’s dead, one must live.

The Franco-Italian Confederation had taken Europe by surprise, putting an unprepared Spain to fire and sword by releasing cartloads of men carelessly sent to die. The generals committed to the League knew that while the best officers had remained loyal to the king, the army was terribly undermanned and they would not find salvation in numbers, but through a volley of miracles. However, during the weeks it took the allied forces to regroup, Lieutenant de Yepes accomplished a miracle. When his soldiers joined forces with other allied troops, they discovered that the junior officer who was the most poorly equipped in men and arms in the entire army was the one who had lost the fewest men and inflicted the greatest losses on the traitors. In those days, there was a remarkable general by the name of Miguel Ybáñez, now deceased, who was serving as army Chief of Staff. He readily promoted valorous young officers while disgracing those who showed no talent for tactics and especially those lacking in any strategic sense. Proper tactics are the backbone of an officer; strategy is both their lungs and their heart. And since no one, when outnumbered ten to one, can afford to lack either spirit or ardour, Ybáñez wanted strategists, above all.

In Alejandro, he found one of high quality.

During the early days of the conflict, Lieutenant de Yepes was cut off from his command. He had free rein and his policy was simple: he had to save on men, time, ammunition, and supplies. The regular troops were more spread out than his, and communication by land was impossible. They were about to run out of supplies and everyone was imagining imminent disaster: blown apart like rats, the isolated units would perish, surrounded by troops that were largely superior in number. Without communications, knowledge of the terrain is an army’s only chance of survival. With a heavy heart, Alejandro sent valiant men out as scouts – more than he would have liked – and lost far more than he would have wanted. But enough men came back to give him a clear picture of the theatre of operations, something to which the enemy, confident of their strength in numbers, paid only moderate attention. In constant retreat, Alejandro infiltrated wherever he could, like water trickling down a slope among roots and rocks. He sought out the best locations for provisioning and resistance, and harried his adversary with lightning actions that made it seem he was everywhere at once. In combat, he held back his artillery, and his men came under fire when they were saving their own resources – to such a degree that one day in December, he immobilized the gunners for nearly half an hour. The enemy shells fell like rain and Alejandro’s men prayed to the Madre, but when the enemy general, convinced all he had to do now was wipe up a handful of ghosts, launched his infantry on them, the same men who had just been praying for their lives now blessed their lieutenant for saving their fine ammunition from being too hastily deployed. They were spread through the valley in loosely knit groups, and not as many men perished as the concentrated enemy fire would have liked. In the end, retreating once again to a place where they could withstand a long siege, they inflicted heavy losses on the other side. As day fell, the stunned adversary could not understand why they had not prevailed, and they realized that they had neither won nor lost the battle.

At the request of Alejandro – now promoted to major – Ybáñez appointed a man from the ranks as lieutenant, who would later become a major himself when Alejandro was made general. His name was Jesús Rocamora and, by his own admission, he hailed from the arse-end of Spain, a little town in Extremadura lost between two deserted expanses of earth to the south-west of Cáceres. A large lake was the only source of subsistence for the poor wretches in the region, who were fishermen and went to sell their catch on the Portuguese border, which meant that their lives were spent between fishing and an equally exhausting walk in fierce summer sun and the biblical cold of winter. There was a priest there who made a similarly meagre living, and a mayor who fished all day long. The curse of the times, for a decade now the lake had been shrinking. Prayers and processions did no good: the waters were evaporating and, whether it was the wrath of God or of Mother Nature, the subsequent generations would be reduced to leaving, or to perishing. And now, through that irony of fate that transforms suffering into desire, those who once cursed their village came to feel a wrenching attachment to it, and although there was not much to like about their life, they had chosen to die there with the last fish.

‘Most men prefer death to change,’ said Jesús to Alejandro one evening when they were bivouacked on a shady little plateau, musing that they themselves would probably be dead by the next day.

‘But you left,’ said Alejandro.

‘It wasn’t because I was afraid to die,’ said Jesús.

‘What other reason did you have?’

‘It is my fate to know hardship and to suffer for mankind. It started in the village, and so it must go on in the outside world.’

Alejandro de Yepes kept Jesús Rocamora by his side throughout the entire war. This progeny of fishing hell was one of the few men to whom he would have entrusted his life without flinching. The other was General Miguel Ybáñez. Chief of Staff of the king’s army, a little man so bow-legged that people said he had been born on horseback, he was reputed to be the best horseman in the realm, a rider who leapt rather than climbed into the saddle. From his perch, he would stare down at you with his shining eyes and nothing could matter more than pleasing him. From what fabric is the skill for command cut? Yet in his gaze there was weariness and sadness. Most of the time he listened attentively, made few remarks, and gave his orders as if complimenting a friend, his voice devoid of all military sharpness – in response to which his men went out ready to die for him or for Spain, it was all the same, because the spectre of fear had vanished, for a time.

Just imagine what it means to inhabit the province of life and death. It is a strange country and its only strategists are those who speak the language. They are called on to address the living and the dead as if they were all one, and Alejandro was well versed in that idiom. As a child, no matter the path he took, he was irresistibly drawn to the walls of the cemetery at Yepes. There, among the stones and crosses, he felt he was once again among his people. He did not know how to speak to them, but the peacefulness of the place susurrated with words for him. What is more, even when it meant nothing, the music of the dead reached him somewhere in his chest that understood, with no need of words. In these moments of great fulfilment, he could discern an intense sparkling at the edge of his vision, and he knew he was seeing the light from some form of unknown, powerful spirit.

Ybáñez was also an initiate, and drew the strength therefrom that made him such a singular leader of men. In the month of November of the third year of the war, he came to Yepes to meet Alejandro. The young major had left the north and gone to the castillo not knowing why he had been summoned. A few snow flurries were falling, Ybáñez seemed gloomy, and the conversation was unusual.

‘Do you remember what you said the first time we met?’ asked Ybáñez. ‘That the war would last a long time and we would have to track it down behind its successive masks? Everyone who failed to understand this is dead now.’

‘Others died who were aware of what was at stake,’ said Alejandro.

‘Who will win?’ retorted Ybáñez, as if he had been asked. ‘I’ve been endlessly harassed, both about the war and about victory. But no one ever asks the right question.’

He raised his glass in silence. Despite its wretchedness, the castillo boasted a cellar of perfectly aged wines, vintages once offered to Alejandro’s father Juan de Yepes, as well as to his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so on up the line to the dawn of time. This is what happened. One morning, somewhere in Europe, a man would wake up and know that he had to set out for a certain castle in Extremadura, a place he had never heard of until now. It did not occur to him that this notion was either fantastical or impractical, and not for a moment did the voyager hesitate or doubt when he came to a crossroads. These men were prosperous winemakers whose cellars contained the fruit of their talent, and now they selected wonderful bottles that they would once have reserved for their sons’ weddings. They arrived at the gate of the castillo, handed the bottle to the father, the grandfather, or another one of Alejandro’s ancestors; they were given something to eat and a glass of sherry; then without further ado, after standing for a moment at the top of the tower, they went away again. Back in their own land, every morning they would think of the glass of sherry, the generous bread, the violet ham; the day went on and their servants could see how greatly they were changed. What had happened at the castillo? As far as the Counts of Yepes were concerned, nothing differed in any way from the usual customs of their rank, and they were unaware of the strange ballet by which others were lured by their castillo. No one was surprised, the event occurred and was forgotten, and Alejandro was the first ever to concern himself with it. But when he enquired, no one knew what to reply, and he spent his childhood feeling like an anomaly within the anomaly of the castillo. When the feeling grew so strong that it caused him pain in the chest, he went to the cemetery and communed once more with the dead.

This inclination for tombstones proved fortunate, for twenty years earlier he was in the cemetery on the November day when his entire family perished. Men had attacked the castillo and killed everyone they found. No one knew how many of them there were, how they had come, or how they left. No lookouts – in other words, the eyes of old women and shepherds – had seen them coming; it was as if they had come out of nowhere and returned there in the same way. Alejandro left the cemetery that day because the strange light tasted of blood, but as he headed back up to the castillo the only traces he saw in the snow were the pawprints of hares and deer. Yet before he even went through the gate into the fortress, he knew. His body urged him to fall to his knees, but he continued on his way, down his path of suffering.

He was ten years old and the only surviving descendant of his clan.

The funeral was remarkable. It was as if all of Extremadura had gathered in Yepes, their numbers swollen by past visitors who had managed to reach the village in time. It made for a strange crowd, to add to the strangeness of everything else that day – the Mass, the procession, the burial, and the homily given by a priest cloaked in a wind-ravaged cassock. The wind had begun to blow when the coffins left the castillo, and stopped abruptly with the last word of the funeral oration. And then silence fell all around, until the bells tolled the Angelus, and there was a feeling of departing an unknown land – this is what had quietly filled people’s hearts all day long, this inner crossing, this aimless wandering along unfamiliar paths, undisturbed by the priest’s Latin gibberish or the ridiculous sight of a procession of toothless old folk. Now they awoke as from a long meditation and watched Alejandro walking back up the steep slope to the fortress. Only one man was with him, and the village council was praised for its decision to entrust the child to his wise hands. Everyone knew he would take care of the castillo and treat the orphan well; they were glad that he would initiate him into certain higher matters and, above all, they were relieved that they would not have to take charge of it themselves.

Luis Álvarez must have been in his fifties and, whether from the stubbornness or the negligence of the gods, was altogether a little man, somewhat bent and very thin. But when he removed his shirt for the hardest tasks, it revealed the taut and astonishingly vigorous muscles flexing beneath his skin. Similarly, he had an ordinary, unexpressive face, shining with eyes of deep blue, and the contrast between the anonymity of his face and the splendour of his gaze summed up everything there was to know about the man. His position was that of steward: he supervised the upkeep of the domain, collected the rent from the tenant farmers, bought and sold wood, and kept the ledgers. His soul, on the other hand, made him the guardian of the stars of the castillo. In the evening when they dined in the kitchen of the deserted fortress, Luis spoke with his pupil at length, for this man, dedicated to serving the powerful and dealing with trivial commerce, was in fact a great intellectual and a masterful poet. He had read everything, then reread it, and he wrote the sort of lyrical poetry that only a fervent soul can produce – a poetry of incantations to the sun and murmurs of stars, love, and crosses; of prayers in the night, and silent quests. It was while writing his poetry that he perceived at the edge of his vision the same light Alejandro received from his dead, and he alone, more than anyone, would have been able to answer the boy’s questions about pilgrimage. However, he kept his peace.

And so, for eight years, every day at noon, he could be seen coming down from the fortress in the company of the adolescent and sitting at his table at the inn, wearing the same white shirt with an officer’s collar and the same light-coloured suit, the same worn leather boots and the same wide-brimmed hat, straw in summer and felt when the first frosts arrived, in winter adding one of those long overcoats that shepherds on horseback are known to wear. They would serve him a glass of sherry, and he would stay for an hour while everyone stopped by, asking about his latest poem or the estimated price of cattle. When he was seated he seemed tall because he held himself straight, one leg over the other, one hand on his thigh, elbow propped on the table. He would take a sip intermittently, then wipe his lips with the white napkin folded next to his glass. He seemed enveloped in silence, although he spoke a great deal during these meetings that passed for banal conversation. His elegance was not intimidating; it was elevating, comforting. Next to him, Alejandro sat quietly, and learned the life of poor men.

A lower-ranked man can hold an entire country together. Blessed are the lands which know the comfort of such a being, without whom they are doomed to languish and die. In fact, everything can be read in two opposite ways; one has only to see grandeur in the place of wretchedness, or ignore the glory that shines through decline. Poverty had not made the place indigent: it evoked a calming fragrance of splendour and dreams, made all the more remarkable by deprivation; and as long as Luis Álvarez was managing the fortress it was considered a place to be proud of, despite the knowledge that its land was no longer fertile and its walls were crumbling. And so, after the murder of the Yepes family, the steward naturally took over the tasks they had once performed. He presided over the first village council meeting after the tragedy, and later, when people looked back, it appeared to them as a moment of great dignity; in our collapsing world, such memories are almost more precious than life itself. He opened the meeting, then said a few words to honour the dead, and there can be little doubt that these words kept Alejandro from the madness of sorrow and made him a sane man – in particular the final words, which were addressed to him, although Luis refrained from looking in his direction: the living must tend to the dead. The child was sitting to the right of his steward, his gaze was feverish, but stiller than a stone. However, after he had heard these words, the feverishness of his eyes flickered out and he wriggled on his chair like any boy his age. Then the steward called the votes in the manner of the ancestors, naming the families and striking with his hammer at each decision. When everything had been examined and voted on, he adjourned the meeting and asked the priest to say the prayer for the dead. As the old priest was stumbling over his words, he continued for him, and at the end the entire council voiced the responses – nevertheless, one should not suppose that Luis Álvarez reigned over the land solely because he respected the organization of its rites: if the steward of the castillo had a natural authority, it was because he had created bonds with everyone, bonds that were rooted in a soil so spiritual that anyone who knew its poetry was born to govern the land. In the end, just after the last amen, the women began singing an old song from Extremadura. A song that no one knows any more today, in a language that no one can translate any more, but by God, was the music beautiful! It mattered little that no one understood it; it carried a message from stormy skies and a fertile land where the joy of the harvests mingled with the struggle to survive.

It was Luis Álvarez, in the end, who shaped Alejandro’s vocation for war. On the eve of his sixteenth year, they were sitting by the fire, and the adolescent was drinking his first wine. Since Juan’s death, there had been no visitors to the fortress, but the cellar held a collection of bottles that would last for centuries. Alejandro was finishing his second glass of petrus when Luis recited the poem he had composed that morning.

‘I find some of them in my heart,’ he said. ‘But this one came from another world.’

To the earth and the sky

Live for your dead

And stand vulnerable

Before mankind

That in the final hour

Your noblesse will oblige us

‘What determines noblesse?’ asked Alejandro, after a moment’s silence.

‘Courage,’ replied Luis.

‘And what makes courage?’ asked Alejandro again.

‘Confronting one’s fear. For most of us, it is the fear of dying.’

‘I’m not afraid of dying,’ said Alejandro. ‘I’m afraid of being responsible for men and failing them because the devil in me will have triumphed over the guardian angel.’

‘Then you must go wherever you can wage that battle.’

Two years later, Alejandro left for the military academy. He had neither money nor savoir-faire, which is why he was a mere lieutenant at the beginning of the war; nor did he have a talent for schemes to advance his career. All he wanted was to learn. After the academy, he set about joining units whose leaders had their men’s respect – and so he learned, and the day the war broke out, he considered himself ready.

Naturally, he was mistaken.

He learned his lesson from circumstance, then from a simple soldier during one of the first battles. Alejandro had already noticed this man from the ranks who had proved to be very efficient at carrying out orders. Something told him that the soldier was from a poor background, but nothing in Jesús Rocamora’s behaviour invited familiarity or condescension: he was an aristocrat of the sort who are not born in castles, but where noblesse oblige is written in the heart. He was handsome, too, with an open face and sharply drawn features, shining blue eyes, and lips crafted by a lacemaker’s needle. Like Alejandro, he was not tall, but he had a fine bearing, black hair, broad shoulders, and hands that were not coarse like a fisherman’s. Let us add that he liked to embellish his speech with expressions that would make a hussar blush, then return to the absolute gravity that is the custodian of noble causes.

On the fifth day of the war, Alejandro’s troops were caught in a pincer movement; the lieutenant from Yepes was witnessing the moment when his men no longer understood him and, in panic, began to do everything back to front. And then, thanks to one of history’s apparent miracles, Jesús Rocamora was suddenly at his side, begging for an order, gazing at him like a dog at its master.

‘We’ve got to wheel the artillery round on the north flank,’ cried Alejandro, for whom the appearance of a man ready to listen was a godsend.

Then he looked at him and suddenly realized that Jesús should have been with the third unit, four miles from there.

‘And retreat through the southern pass?’ shouted Jesús in turn.

Alejandro had given those precise instructions earlier, and several times over, but no one had wanted or known how to follow them. Jesús Rocamora, however, saw to it that followed they were. Better still, he did not leave his lieutenant for a second – no sooner had he set things in motion than he came back, the way a dog returns to his master, to wait for the next order, which he already knew. After two hours of this, they found themselves on a precipitous ridge, where an angel’s fart would suffice to either send them into the abyss or show them the pathway down the mountain. Alejandro shouted to Jesús: Go, go, stop asking for orders! Jesús looked at him blankly and Alejandro said again, Go, away with you! So the other man ran off like a yapping dog and showered his men with orders, no longer wasting time returning to his superior.

They survived. Then they talked. Every evening they would speak, and their acquaintance grew in a brotherly mood that precluded any sense of hierarchy. Then at dawn, lieutenant and soldier would put on their insignia and fight side by side with respect for their ranks. When Alejandro ventured to admit that he would have liked a more enviable status for Jesús, the soldier said: Fishing is the only hell I will ever know on this planet.

It was also Jesús who taught Alejandro his greatest lesson about war, and turned him from a mere tactician into a strategist.

‘It’ll be a long war,’ he told his lieutenant, one evening when they were bivouacking on the shady little plateau.

‘You don’t think we’ll surrender soon?’ asked Alejandro.

‘We are the lords of these lands: we won’t lose them as soon as all that. But winning is another matter. It will take time for our leaders to comprehend that while the forms of war may have changed, the essence has remained the same. Once the fronts are stable – vast fronts, sir, the likes of which we’ve never seen – and the generals see that no one will carry the day any time soon, it will become obvious that everything has been staked upon tactics – outdated tactics at that – but that war is still just what it has always been.’

‘A duel,’ said Alejandro.

‘A duel to the death,’ said Jesús. ‘Tactics can be adapted, but in the end the winner will be whoever is the best strategist.’

‘And what makes for the best strategist?’ asked Alejandro.

‘Ideas always triumph over weapons,’ said Jesús. ‘Who would entrust an engineer with the keys to paradise? It is the divine part in us that determines our fate. The best strategist is the one who looks death in the eye and reads there that he must not be afraid of losing. And with every war, this changes.’

‘The real lords are the fishermen,’ said Alejandro with a smile.

And then Jesús told him the story of his moment of revelation.

‘I’m the son of a fisherman, but from the moment I set eyes on the lake, at an age when I couldn’t even walk or talk, I knew I wouldn’t become one. After that, I forgot what I knew. When I was a boy, I followed in my father’s footsteps. I knew how to set the nets and bring them in, how to mend them, and all the things you need to know for the job. My first fourteen years were spent between rigging and walking, and I didn’t want to remember that first sight of the lake. But on the morning of my fifteenth birthday, I went down to the lake. It was a misty dawn, and someone had gone over the landscape with ink; the water was black while the mist drew incredible images. That landscape … that landscape went straight to the heart. I had a vision of the lake – dried up – and of a great battle, and of the face of a child instantly erased by the face of an old man. Finally, everything disappeared, the mist rose to the sky, and I fell to my knees in tears, because I knew I was going to betray my father and go away. I wept for a long time, until my body was drier than the lake I had seen in my vision, then I stood up and looked one last time at the dark water. In that moment, I felt I had just been entrusted with a burden, but also that this cross to bear would free me from my shame. With the priest, I learned to read and write, and two years later I enlisted.’

Surrounded since childhood by the kindness of his elders and the affection of his peers, Alejandro had never known the brotherly friendship of men who have lived through the same trials. At the age of eighteen he had seen the army as a place to fulfil his desire for courage, and he experienced solidarity with his fellow soldiers of the sort that comes with the possibility of combat. But he had never yet met anyone whose heart was in tune with his own. When he went back to Yepes during the last year of the war to set up his headquarters in the castillo, he walked up the main street through the village, happy to see people coming up to shake his hand, the old folk embracing him. Outside the fortress, the priest came to meet him with the mayor at his side, leaning on a cane. They were dressed in black, as awkward and gloomy as scarecrows, but their faces lit up, for once, with their pride in the fact that their young lord was one of the great generals of the day. Alejandro felt his heart racing with gratitude and cheer, to be acknowledged and celebrated in this way. Next to him, Major Rocamora was smiling, and the people of Yepes appreciated both his open gaze and his devotion to their general. If, on top of it, Alejandro had known that they rejoiced in his friendship with Jesús because it meant a lord was indebted to a fisherman, his emotion, no doubt, would have increased tenfold.

There they stood, the young general and his young major, at the top of the tower in the castillo, now that the war had been raging for six years, bringing with it all the plagues that war always brings. They stood expectantly, like the world holding its breath on the eve of battle, on the summit where the roll of a single pebble will determine victory or surrender.

‘It’s going to snow,’ said Jesús.

Alejandro had seen only two Novembers with snow: the one when his family was murdered, twenty years earlier, and the one when Miguel Ybáñez had come to see him in Yepes, three years earlier, in the days when the conflict was spreading further than anyone would have predicted. After their conversation about the long war, Miguel Ybáñez had asked Alejandro to take him to the cemetery. The two men stood by the graves in silence, and, after a moment, Alejandro saw the shimmer that was always there. Thick snowflakes began to fall and before long the cemetery was covered in a light powder that glistened in the late afternoon light. After they left, Ybáñez seemed lost in luminous, grave thoughts. The next morning, just before heading out into the frosty dawn, he told Alejandro he was appointing him major general and entrusting him with the leadership of the first army.

Three months later, the general from Yepes learned of the generalissimo’s death, and he knew his life would be repeatedly marked by the murder of those who were dearest to him. For Alejandro, the death of Miguel Ybáñez was a personal tragedy, but it was also tragic for the soldier in him: the staff needed men of Ybáñez’s fibre, and Alejandro had never met anyone else like him. His thoughts echoed with the words the general had uttered as he left the fortress.

‘Meditate as often as you can.’

Although he was from Madrid, Ybáñez had told him that he used to spend his childhood summers at his mother’s family home, on the slope of a mountain overlooking Granada.

‘That’s where I learned the power of ideas,’ he said. ‘What else can you do when you see the sun rising over eternal snows and suddenly the Alhambra is there before you? Someday it will be destroyed, because that is the fate of works of human genius, but the idea behind it will never die. It will be born again elsewhere, in another form of beauty and power, because we receive the idea of it from the dead speaking to us from the sanctuary of their graves.’

Pensively gazing into his glass, he added: ‘That is why I conceive of the art of war as a meditation in the company of my dead.’ Then he fell silent. After a moment, he said one last thing. ‘Because ideas alone are not enough, one must also have a mandate. That is the question that no one ever asks me: who do we get it from and to what kingdom does it consign us?’

‘We get it from our ancestors,’ said Alejandro.

‘You are thinking about mandates and forgetting the kingdom,’ replied Miguel. ‘And yet tomorrow our kingdom will be covered with camps where people will be burned.’

I have tried to describe Alejandro de Yepes through the three major figures of his youth, who shared the same aspirations in life as him. Why are some born to take responsibility for others, so that their lives become nothing but a succession of battles through which they learn to accept their burden? From that moment on, these battles, this burden, make them into guides whom their troops or brothers will follow to the gates of hell. However, this responsibility for other souls does not stop at the threshold to the cemetery, because the dead are also entrusted to these singular men, and the terrible weight of the kingdom of the dead, the burning obligation to respond to the call, is what we refer to as the life of the dead: a silent, incandescent life, more intense and magnificent than any other, and a few individuals among the living have agreed to be its messengers.

Sons! To the earth and the sky!

Sons! Live for your dead!

Brothers! Stand vulnerable before us!

Brothers! Your noblesse will oblige us

Book of Battles

戦

BATTLE

How did this war differ from previous ones?

There was the fact that the western world no longer knew its dead: either because it had grown old and was approaching an end it did not want to see, or because it had reached the limits of its dream and had to construct another one. In any case, it lacked the whispering of the dead, without which none can live honourably – who can call an existence decent if it has not been given a mandate?

As for me, right from the start it seemed as if the battle would have to be resolved by radically rewriting the dream of history. Never had murder come closer to triumphing over poetry.

殺人

MURDER

The life of Alejandro de Yepes had begun with the murder of his family and continued with that of his protector, and he sensed, correctly, that he would endure other crimes. What he did not know, however, was that long before he came into the world, the source of his own story lay in a distant murder whose protagonists were strangers to him.

Given that it had been committed neither for gain nor for power, but because the murderer had an obscure premonition that his victim had been sent by the devil, this murder occupied an unusual spot in the sequence of major murders, a spot that yielded up the hope of something beneficial.

Can one ever escape from a destiny of murder? Hope and horror – this shall all be told below. There is only fiction; there are only stories. And I needn’t know the endings in advance.

DARKER THAN NIGHT

Now two hours have gone by and Alejandro de Yepes, from the tower of his castillo, is watching the snow fall in the night. He has just been woken, and he’s not sure he understands what is happening.

‘How long has the snow been falling?’ he asked.

‘For two hours,’ Jesús replied. ‘In two hours, six feet of snow have fallen.’

‘Six feet,’ said Alejandro. ‘And you say these men arrived without leaving footprints?’

‘Our watchmen are positioned so close together that even an ant could not get through. And besides, what sort of man can make his way through this snow? I don’t know how they got here but it was not by road.’

‘From the sky?’

‘I don’t know. Suddenly there they were in front of us, in the grand hall, and one of the redheads asked to speak to General de Yepes, adding that he was sorry about the snow.’ He wiped his hand across his brow. ‘I know, sir. When I tell it like this, it all seems so strange. But I would stake my life on it that they are not enemies.’

‘Where are they now?’ asked Alejandro.

‘In the cellar. It is what the redhead requested. He seems very well informed, I must say.’

They looked at each other for a moment.

‘Should I have them brought up?’ asked Jesús.

‘No,’ said Alejandro, ‘I’ll go down.’ And circling back on himself: ‘There’s something about this snow.’

‘It’s not falling the way it usually does,’ said Jesús.

The cellar extended beneath the entire castillo. It was a gigantic place, lit by torches which the steward, back in his day, would hold aloft as he walked up and down the rows of bottles. On the floor of sand and beaten earth, Luis would trace figures with a rake, in keeping with his mood of the moment. When he walked on them the next day, they remained intact, and this was not, by a long shot, the only marvel in the place. You did not have to be an architect to realize that an entire castillo cannot stand on such a huge open space devoid of any pillars. You could walk along rows of old copper racks that had been there for who knows how long, and the arrangement of the various wines was mysterious, too. Luis would lay the bottle he’d been given in a certain place, and the next day he would find it somewhere else. The only bottles that could be easily removed from their nook were at the end of the last row at the very back of the cellar, where he had received the delivery of petrus for Alejandro’s sixteenth birthday. Finally, on certain occasions, the door to the place was kept closed, and when it was opened again everything had changed, although the beauty of it never disappointed. No matter which torch Luis lit, it would project an iridescent glow that glistened on the copper racks, and perpetuated its sparkle from one end of the cellar to the other; moving lines of luminous pearls traced a perfect, translucent architecture in the space; rows of earth and sand were interwoven, creating a feeling of peace. Luis had to show visitors the way out, otherwise they would have stayed there for the rest of their days.

That night, the cellar was even more resplendent than usual. In the tilted bottles, the wine shimmered with flashes of pale gold, and a strange dull silvery glow cloaked the floor. In one gloomy corner, they found the three men grunting like pigs beneath their dark, hooded capes. The one who was laughing loudest had a few flame-coloured locks of hair showing; the second, who had brown hair, was so massive in appearance that the others looked like imps in comparison.

Motionless, arms crossed, six feet from the threesome, Alejandro cleared his throat. They paid no attention. The intruders had found a barrel somewhere, on which they had placed their glasses and an impressive row of fine vintages. Of course, all three were completely drunk, something Jesús summed up by exclaiming, ‘Oh, the bastards!’

Alejandro cleared his throat again, with no more success than the first time, while the third thief caressed a bottle of rare champagne, saying: ‘What we need now is some bubbly.’

At the same time, his hat slipped back to reveal another fiery head of hair; a bright reflection from one of the racks lit up his fine, squirrel-like features; then everything went dark again. The only light came from the crystal glasses where they had poured champagne while Alejandro and Jesús looked on in silence. There was something wrong, but devil take them if they could say what it was, other than that it had to do with the liquid itself, which the second redhead was pouring cautiously. The two other men, very focused, kept an eye on the operation. Finally, they all relaxed, and Jesús and Alejandro saw that the bubbles were hastening towards the bottom of the champagne glasses, where they dissolved in a tiny hissing maelstrom.

‘Santa Madre,’ murmured Jesús.

A singular irony: while exclamations and throat-clearing had not sufficed to distract the drinkers, this faint murmur caused all three to turn around at once. The first redhead stood up straight, somewhat painfully, and reached for a torch. His head was wobbling, he was squinting slightly, and intermittently let out strange noises. However, he seemed to be the leader, for the others looked at him and waited for him to make the first move.

‘Well, well,’ he muttered.

Then he turned to his companions with an apologetic look. The tallest one pointed a finger towards his pocket and the redhead’s face lit up as he repeated, Ah, well, well! And the three men flung their heads back to drink from flasks they pulled out from underneath their cloaks. Judging by the faces they were making, the liquid must have had a bitter taste, but the most remarkable thing was that they instantaneously sobered up, and stood solidly on their feet as if they had not just consumed half the cellar – all things which caused Alejandro and Jesús to raise an interested eyebrow, for they too were not averse to drinking.

They all looked at one another again in silence.

The leader of the group was a paunchy little man with a round face and round eyes, fair skin, and countless freckles, accompanied by a fine double chin and an abundant mane of hair, sagging shoulders, and an upturned nose. In a word, he was not particularly becoming. But no soldier can fail to discern the danger concealed by artless attire, and Alejandro and Jesús saw that the man’s gaze belied his bearing, that however inoffensive and good-natured he might seem, it would be dangerous to underestimate him, and that anyone who had made that mistake had probably not lived to brood over it; in short, they saw that this amiable inebriate was one of their own kind.

‘I owe you an explanation,’ said the man.

The tall, dark-haired man stepped forwards, bowed briefly and said, ‘Marcus, at your service.’

The redhead did likewise and said, ‘Paulus.’

To which their leader added, also bowing: ‘Petrus, your humble servant.’ Then, somewhat brazenly: ‘May I tempt you with a little upside-down champagne?’

A moment passed. Alejandro was still standing with his arms crossed, a stern expression on his face, rigid and silent as he confronted the strangers. Jesús … well, Jesús could not help but want to taste the champagne. There always comes a time when a man of reason discovers a penchant for extravagance, particularly when he has witnessed lakes evaporating without warning and mist writing sibylline messages on the sky. Moreover, in spite of the fantastical nature of the circumstances, he trusted these men.

Alejandro, his face inscrutable, took a step forwards.

Another moment passed.

He took another step, and smiled.

‘Alejandro de Yepes,’ he said, holding his hand out to Petrus. ‘You are acquainted with my tutor, I believe? He just went by, behind you.’

‘Oh, we met earlier,’ replied Petrus, shaking his hand. ‘I am glad he appears to you as well.’

‘Didn’t you see him?’ Alejandro asked Jesús.

‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘You saw the steward’s ghost?’

‘Just behind that gentleman,’ murmured Alejandro, ‘just behind him.’ He gestured invitingly at the barrel. ‘If you would do us the honour of pouring some upside-down champagne.’

Should we be surprised by such composure? Alejandro had been hearing the voices of the dead for so long that it didn’t strike him as incongruous in the least that it was also possible to see them. Luis’s apparition, strolling along the rows of bottles, had had its effect, and now it was with a certain interest that Alejandro awaited what might come next.

They sat down around the makeshift table.

‘You just have to focus,’ said Petrus, slowly pouring champagne into two clean glasses.

‘A nice little vintage,’ Jesús pointed out, ‘it would be a mistake to deprive ourselves.’